Alphabet and Nvidia are backing a bold new chapter in artificial intelligence through their investment in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a startup launched by Ilya Sutskever, the renowned co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI. This strategic move underscores the growing momentum in the AI landscape and highlights the confidence top tech players have in Sutskever’s vision of developing AI that’s not only smarter than humans—but also safe.
Sutskever’s transition from OpenAI to SSI followed a turbulent period in late 2023, when he briefly supported the ousting of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman before reversing course. In May 2024, he stepped away from OpenAI entirely to pursue a more focused ambition: building safe superintelligence. Unlike OpenAI’s commercial approach with products like ChatGPT, SSI remains purely research-oriented. Its mission is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) that advances human progress without posing existential risks.
This purist stance hasn’t deterred investors. On the contrary, it’s drawn in some of the most influential names in tech and venture capital. Alphabet and Nvidia joined Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and others in a recent funding round that raised $2 billion, catapulting SSI’s valuation from $5 billion to an astonishing $32 billion in less than a year. This meteoric rise, despite the absence of commercial products, reflects immense trust in Sutskever’s leadership and the allure of a safe AGI future.
Key to SSI’s research infrastructure is Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), accessed through a cloud partnership with Google. TPUs are specially designed for AI tasks and provide SSI with cutting-edge hardware to scale its models. While Nvidia continues to lead the industry with its high-performance GPUs, SSI’s preference for TPUs indicates a strategic alliance with Google, likely giving the startup unique advantages in both compute power and technical collaboration.
This dual investment by Alphabet and Nvidia represents a broader pattern: tech giants are eager to fund AI ventures that also become clients for their hardware and cloud ecosystems. For Nvidia, it’s a way to maintain dominance in AI computing, even as competitors explore alternatives. For Alphabet, it reinforces its position as a facilitator of next-generation AI breakthroughs.
Though still operating in stealth, SSI has signaled that it’s taking a distinct approach to AI development. Its secrecy, coupled with hints at novel model-building techniques, differentiates it from other research-centric startups like Anthropic. The focus remains singular: creating AI that enhances humanity while remaining controllable and aligned with ethical standards.
SSI’s rise could mark a turning point in how AI is developed and funded. By betting on principles over profit, it challenges the conventional startup model and could influence how future AGI initiatives are shaped. Its success—or failure—will likely have wide-reaching implications for the trajectory of artificial intelligence.